On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 04:15:56PM +1000, Sisyphus wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes via RT" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 2:24 PM > Subject: Ping? [PATCH] Re: [perl #36654] Inconsistent treatment of NaN > > > > Can the patches in: > > http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/103801 > > and > > http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/103906 > > > > be applied (or receive feedback)? Thanks. > > > > > > Hi, > > Is this a question directed to me ? (If so, I don't feel qualified to > answer.) > Alternatively, perhaps this is just a CC to me (though there's nothing to > suggest that's so) of a question being asked of someone else - in which case > my reply can be ignored :-)
It was just a CC to you; sorry for the confusion. Bugs mostly get discussed on the perl5-porters mailing list, and the bug tracker gets followups from the list and files them with the bug report and forwards them to the original reporter. > One thing which surprised me a little was the notion that NaN should be > assigned to a scalar as a string, rather than a bareword. My expectation was > that the *converse* would be encouraged. Since numeric values are normally > assigned as barewords, I thought that NaN and Inf would likewise be assigned > as barewords. Perhaps that's just me being weird. AFAIK, NaN and Inf have never been treated as numeric constants; when things worked before they were barewords (that is to say, strings). Given that this provokes a fatal error under "use strict", it shouldn't be encouraged. Going the other way and making a NaN literal a real numeric constant that's valid under use strict would IMO raise issues with what happens if there's a sub named NaN, and I'd rather avoid that.
